Women’s groups and attorneys yesterday protested a Cabinet--approved amendment to the Criminal Code that would remove one of the criteria for an act to be considered a sexual assault and would raise the penalty for sex offenders, a move the groups said would only result in more offenders escaping punishment.
Amid public dissatisfaction with light verdicts for sex crimes, the Ministry of Justice has proposed an amendment to the Criminal Code. However, the proposed amendment has raised more questions than it has answered.
The amendment still pending legislative review, recommends raising the minimum penalty for sex crimes from three years in prison to five years. Also, it removes the objections of the victim as a criterion when considering whether a sexual assault occurred. Under current legislation, an encounter is considered a sexual assault if it can be proven the act was against the victim’s will or the victim objected.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
In a written statement, the ministry said it had proposed deleting the criterion because when an offender sexually assaulted a victim, “the nature of the act was in violation of the victim’s will, hence, there is no need to include ‘the will of the victim’ as a criterion [for sexual assault] in law.”
If proof that the victim objected is written in the law as a criterion for judging whether a sexual act constituted sexual assault, “the action may not be considered a ‘sexual assault’ if it cannot be objectively proven that it was done in violation of the victim’s will,” the ministry said.
However, “the criterion should not be deleted so recklessly,” Lee Chao-huan (李兆環), an attorney and a researcher on children and young adult issues at the Taipei Bar Association, told a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
“What’s more important is raising gender awareness among judges and conducting thorough research on the issue,” she said.
On average, more than 70 percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by people familiar with the victims, such as friends, colleagues, family members or relatives, and in many cases when a victim is raped by someone she or he knows, “the victim is either too shocked to react, or just succumbs without resisting,” Lee said.
“In such cases, you won’t find any ‘subjective’ evidence — such as wounds or screaming heard by witnesses — that the victim was raped,” she said.
However, Modern Women’s Association executive director Yao Shu-wen (姚淑文) said the amendment, if adopted by the legislature, could make matters worse.
Since it would become difficult to determine whether rape occurred because the victim would no longer be able to say whether she or he was unwilling during intercourse, prosecutors and judges could become more conservative in handing down guilty verdicts -because the new penalty would be more severe, Yao said.
As a result, “we will see more sex offenders escaping sanction,” Yao said.
Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), an attorney and a long-time women’s rights advocate, said government officials and lawmakers should not have the “conventional” image of a sex crime in mind when reviewing a case.
Yu said that the “conventional” image of a sex crime was a -scenario in which a woman is taken by a stranger by force in a car and driven to the middle of nowhere, while screaming and shouting “no” all the way.
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